Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [16]
Mother was there to solve that problem. Harder to solve was the smart-girl dilemma. It wasn’t that I was so smart; it was just that the base in Iwakuni, Japan, was a very, very small pond. I had only one real competitor in the classroom, a pretty waif named Daryl Mayer, but more often than not, I bested her by a little, which made me feel good when Mrs. Defenderfer handed out the papers but didn’t serve me well when we were released to the playground. In fourth grade, when I won out over fifth and sixth graders in art and poetry contests, my fate was sealed: I was a square, what my children now call a nerd. And looking back over the years that followed, I was always a square, or at best on the edge of it. I made many of my own clothes when I was in graduate school, for crying out loud. Roll that image back to a fourth grader, and you get a pretty clear picture of me.
Despite all that, and except for the rock-throwing incident, I don’t think of that time as unhappy. In fact, quite the opposite. Even if I wasn’t the popular Noony Bemis or the blonde and beautiful Christine Rodgers, they were my friends. There were so few people with whom you could play tetherball or bike along the edge of the seawall that everyone, even squares, was included in the fun. We all were Girl Scouts; we all sang in the choir. What else was there to do?
It was 1959. I was nine years old, wearing dresses ordered from the Montgomery Ward catalog and riding my bike around our new base. I spent the greater part of my days in the Matthew C. Perry School or on the playground with other children whose fathers also wore the Navy uniform, most of them pilots, many of them reconnaissance pilots. My father was an aviator trained in intelligence, and his squadron, VQ-1, patrolled the borders of North Korea and what we then called Red China. Though he never talked about what he did as a reconnaissance pilot, not then, not ever, that was the first time I thought I understood his job. It didn’t occur to me, however, that what he did for a living was extraordinarily courageous, even though I had warnings, as when the screen at the base theater would go black during a showing and a message would appear telling all military personnel to go immediately to the terminals. Single men would don their hats, fathers would bend over and kiss their children, the aisles would fill for a few minutes and then be still, and the movie would start again. Or I might have guessed about the danger when Dad said he would be back by Jay’s baseball game on Saturday and he wasn’t, but the newspaper was full of stories of violence in Laos that erupted Friday—maybe Dad was there. In my world, fathers did dangerous work. It wasn’t that they had more courage. It was simply what fathers did. As far as I knew, every nine-year-old American girl lived exactly the same way. As far as I knew, all their fathers—the fathers of every nine-year-old girl, the fathers of every girl—got in a plane and flew away and didn’t come back for days or weeks or even months, and sometimes didn’t come back at all.
And that is what happened to April Decker.
Just before Memorial Day 1959, a plane from my father’s squadron stalled on its approach to the Iwakuni runway and crashed into the Sea of Japan. Four men—one of them April’s father, Lieutenant Commander Ben Decker, who had been a classmate of my father’s at the Naval Academy—were dead.
Within hours of the plane’s tumble, my mother was at the Decker home, breaking the terrible news to April’s mother, Helen. It was news Mother had heard herself before, when she was told that Carl Hallen had died, so she knew what to do and what to say, and what not to say. Mother took April, then only two, to our house, and returned to help Helen dismantle the life her family had shared in Japan. Helen’s parents and Ben’s were half a world away, and the Iwakuni military community that had become her family in the last year